zaterdag 25 januari 2014

The Global Elite: Rigging the Rules That Fuel Inequality

New report from Oxfam states that 85 of the world's richest people own the wealth of half of the world’s population.

- Andrea Germanos, staff writer

The global elite have rigged the rules so that "economic growth looks more like a winner-take-all system" that undermines democracy and threatens future generations with a "cascade of privilege and disadvantage," a new report from Oxfam states.

Seven out of 10 people live in countries where economic inequality has increased over the past three decades.

In 24 out of 26 countries the top one percent increased their share of income from 1980 to 2012.

In the U.S. following the 2009 financial crisis, the bottom 90 percent has become poorer while the top one percent has captured 95 percent of the growth.

Among the factors that are contributing to policies that favor the rich and corporations over everyone else are tax havens and tax structures that enable tax dodging, financial deregulation, and austerity policies that have benefited investors while hurting everyone else. As the report states, these policies undermine democracy:

When there is growth and diminishing inequality, the rules governing markets are working of the middle classes and the poorest sections of society. However, when only the rich are gaining, the rules start bending towards their interests exclusively. [...]

Concentration of wealth in the hands of the few leads to undue political influence, which ultimately robs citizens of natural resource revenues, produces unfair tax policies and encourages corrupt practices, and challenges the regulatory powers of governments. Taken together, all of these consequences serve to worsen accountability and social inclusion.

"We will soon live in a world where equality of opportunity is just a dream. In too many countries economic growth already amounts to little more than a ‘winner takes all’ windfall for the richest."Winnie Byanyima, Oxfam Executive Director, states that a continuation of such policies will contribute to inequality for generations to come.

"In developed and developing countries alike, we are increasingly living in a world where the lowest tax rates, the best health and education and the opportunity to influence are being given not just to the rich but also to their children," stated Byanyima.

"Without a concerted effort to tackle inequality, the cascade of privilege and of disadvantage will continue down the generations. We will soon live in a world where equality of opportunity is just a dream. In too many countries economic growth already amounts to little more than a ‘winner takes all’ windfall for the richest," Byanyima stated.

Oxfam is urging those attending the World Economic Forum (WEF) to address growing inequality by supporting fair, progressive taxation, eliminating tax havens, supporting a living wage, eliminating undue influence of wealth on policies, and reversing course on austerity by using tax revenue to fund universal health care, education and social protections.

____________________

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License.

Davos' Elite Message Deserves 'Fierce Resistance' Not Applause

Corporations represented at global gathering are cause of crises they claim to want to solve

- Jon Queally, staff writer

As the World Economic Forum kicks off its global summit in Davos, Switzerland on Wednesday, critics of the annual gathering are eager to show that the well-polished public image of the event should not be allowed to eclipse the nefarious and destructive role played by the many corporate elites that sponsor it.

Looking down on Davos. (Photo: Twitpic via Oxfam)Even amid seemingly thoughtful discussions about climate change, economic inequality, water scarcity and other key global issues, what's important to remember, says Alex Jensen, an expert on globalization and development at theInternational Society for Ecology and Culture (ISEC), is that a critical look at any of these crises shows "the complicity of the very corporations that the WEF represents."

Beyond its glossy "veneer," Jensen says, the Davos summit acts as a stage "for multinational corporations, among them human rights abusers, political racketeers, property thieves and international environmental criminals."

According to Jensen, looking at Davos' corporate sponsors this year—which include Nestle, Shell, Wal-Mart, Syngenta, and Goldman Sachs—is like looking at a 'Who's Who' list of corporate criminals. He writes:

The corporations represented by the World Economic Forum are the agents principally responsible for destroying the planet, ravaging livelihoods, and literally starving people, all while aggrandizing unprecedented profits into the hands of an ever-tinier super elite. Seen in this light, all the burnished social and environmental concern-speak of the WEF is so much vacuous corporate swagger, the crudest sort of greenwash. Even though these companies actually spend huge amounts of capital and energy fighting environmental regulation and the citizen’s groups who are suffering their abuses, they simultaneously pursue a strategic embrace of environmental discourse and narratives; they accept the existence of the problems while promoting privatized, technocratic strategies for addressing them. These strategies pivot between those that assign responsibility for causing and fixing the problems to individual consumers, and those that position the corporations themselves as crucial players in the common cause of “improving”/”cleaning” the environment – the same one, incidentally, that they destroyed.

Ahead of this year's summit, the international aid agency Oxfam International released a report slamming "the winner take all" approach now endemic to global capitalism. According to the report, the wealthy elites exemplified by attendees at Davos have "co-opted political power to rig the rules of the economic game, undermining democracy and creating a world where the 85 richest people own the wealth of half of the world’s population."

"The growth of equality demands something more than economic growth, even though it presupposes it. It demands first of all 'a transcendent vision of the person',” Francis continued.

“It also calls for decisions, mechanisms and processes directed to a better distribution of wealth, the creation of sources of employment and an integral promotion of the poor which goes beyond a simple welfare mentality.”

For critics like Jensen, however, such plaintive lectures to the elite gathered in Davos mistake the larger issue.

The mission of Davos and its participants is clear, he says: To "advance the power, growth, and wealth of the corporate rulers of the world."

It should not be coddled or applauded, says Jensen, but "fiercely resisted."

___________________________________________________

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License.

vrijdag 24 januari 2014

'Poverty and the Tolerance of the Intolerable.' No country in the world, he declared, is 'free from poverty,' though in India, the country of his birth, where there is a 'massive disparity between the privileged and the rest,' extreme deprivation is particularly deeply entrenched. India, he said, is an example of a country with a large middle class which is able to tolerate, with something approaching equanimity, the serious poverty in its midst. (Although the situation in India is extreme—Sen referred to the 'special nature of the neglect of its poor' —there is no reason for those of us elsewhere in the world, especially the developed world, to be complacent. “Blaming the victims” of poverty, he observed, is as common today as it was in the era of the Poor Law.)

How is it, Sen asked, that a society is able to avert its gaze from, or else accept as a 'fact of life,' the kind of deprivation that robs human beings of the very 'social qualities' that make us the sort of creatures we are? To illustrate the damage that poverty does, Sen recalled his own experience, as a child of almost ten, of the Bengal famine of 1943. He remembered giving a banana to a malnourished woman and child. The woman burst into tears as she instinctively started to feed herself before offering the fruit to her child. 'We are no longer human beings,' she cried.

Modern revolutionaries from the Jacobins onwards share these beliefs, but whereas the millenarians believed that only God could remake the world, modern revolutionaries imagined it could be reshaped by humanity alone. This is a notion as far-fetched as anything believed in medieval times. Perhaps for that reason it has always been presented as having the authority of science. Modern politics has been driven by the belief that humanity can be delivered from immomorial evils by the power of knowledge.

3. according to UNICEF, nearly half the world's population lives on less than $2.50 a day. One billion children live in poverty, and 22,000 of them die each day because of it. More than one billion people lack access to adequate drinking water, and 400 million of those are children. Almost a billion people go hungry every day,

terwijl

4. the incomes of 100 people out of the seven billion on the planet could fix that, and then fix it again, and then fix it again, and then fix it again.

Whether we must, in order to avoid a major economic catastrophe, and to attenuate the social injustice caused by the crisis, stimulate consumption and the economic machine such as it still is, is a question as urgent as it is legitimate — as long as such a policy does not simply aggregate the situation at the cost of millions and billions of euros or dollars while at the same time masking the true question, which is to produce a vision and a political will capable of progressively moving away from the economic-political complex of investment, which must be a social and political investment or, in other words, an investment in a common desire, that is, in what Aristotle called philia (liefde voor de medemens. svh), and which would then form the basis of a new type of economic investment.

By Don Quijones, a freelance writer and translator based in Barcelona, Spain. His blog,Raging Bull-Shit, is a modest attempt to challenge some of the wishful thinking and scrub away the lathers of soft soap peddled by our political and business leaders and their loyal mainstream media.

If the past week’s tumultuous events in Spain have shown us anything, it is that there are two realities vying for influence and attention. There is the reality of the “markets,” those wonderfully benign, miraculously self-regulating, self-correcting natural organisms that help to ensure the free and efficient movement of goods and assets while, as if by magic, making a tiny handful of hyper-connected people and companies fabulously wealthy.

Suffice to say that according to the global markets, the Spanish economy is on the mend and well on its way to a spectacular recovery.

And then there is the increasingly grim on-the-ground reality in which millions of Spaniards — some with precarious, low-paying jobs, others with no jobs at all — are struggling to make ends meet. It is a reality that continues to worsen yet is often ignored, hidden or obfuscated by the political and business leaders and their loyal servants in the mainstream media.

Normally these two realities co-exist relatively peaceably, barely cognizant of the other’s existence. Every now and then, their paths may intersect, only to quickly decouple.

But this week they suffered a head-on clash.

Rajoy’s Triumphant Return to America

The week began with news of Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy’s visit to the United States, where he was praised at the White House for his “great leadership” (a subject on which President Obama is naturally a respected authority).

Rajoy was also courted at Congress and feted on Wall Street. Clearly, things have changed since his last visit to the Big Apple, when he was subjected to an unusually feisty grilling from Bloomberg’s Sarah Eisen on the many scandals implicating his government. After stumbling and bumbling his way through one unconvincing untruth after another, Rajoy’s lackeys tried to browbeat the broadcaster into cutting out the most embarrassing parts from the interview — to no avail.

This time around, everyone who is anyone in Washington and New York seemed determined to shake Rajoy’s hand and congratulate him on a job well done. And for good reason: not only have his government’s eager embracement of the Troika’s neoliberal agenda and its profligate bailout of Spain’s financial sector (to the tune, so far, of 280 billion euros) helped to steady (at least temporarily and superficially) the EU’s sinking economy, it has also presented rich pickings to many of the world’s biggest corporations — in particular, Europe and America’s too-fat-to-fail banks, private equity funds and vulture capitalists.

While in Washington, Rajoy also met with the perma-tanned head of the IMF, Christine Lagarde, who a few days later announced the final withdrawal of the organisation’s suited-and-booted troops from the Bank of Spain. Presumably, their makeshift work spaces in the country’s now-toothless central bank will remain in place, just in case the bad times return — which, considering they never went away in the first place, should be pretty darned soon.

As a matter of fact, as this week’s tumultuous events in Spain’s parallel dimension — i.e. its bread and butter communities — have shown, not only has the recovery long trumpeted by the government and parroted by the financial media failed to materialise, conditions on the ground are arguably bleaker than ever.

Burnin’ & Lootin’ in Burgos, Spain

While Rajoy was being wined, dined and serenaded in the gilded chambers of American power, Spain’s northern city of Burgos was hit by a wave of violent protests. What began as a simmering dispute over the city’s semi-bankrupt council’s plans to convert one of the busiest thoroughfares into a largely pedestrianised boulevard boiled over last Saturday night (Jan. 11) into pitched battles between local residents and riot police (click here to view images).

A staunchly conservative provincial capital of middling size, Burgos is hardly the sort of place you’d expect to find protestors burning rubbish bins and smashing up the windows of a Santander bank. But first appearances are often misleading: Gamonal, the predominantly working class neighbourhood at the center of the dispute, is in many ways the perfect microcosm of what is happening in less prosperous communities across Spain.

Of its 60,000 residents (one-third of Burgos’ total population), 18,000 are unemployed. What’s more, over the last five years a whole gamut of local social support mechanisms and public services have been skinned and gutted, all to help pay for the fallout from the construction bubble and collapse of the country’s savings banks.

One of the most common grievances voiced by protestors is that local, publicly subsidised nursery schools — a vital lifeline for hard-strapped working families — are being closed down due to budget shortfalls of a few thousand euros a piece. Meanwhile, the council intends to splash out 8 million euros on a largely unwelcome urban redevelopment project, 5 million of which will go toward the construction of an underground car park that will charge users extortionate fares.

According to Ignacio Escolar, the senior editor of El Diario and a former Burgos resident, the project’s primary beneficiary would be the city’s most powerful businessman, Antonio Miguel Méndez Pozo (a.k.a. el jefe [the boss]). A local construction magnate and owner of Burgos’s biggest-selling newspaper, Méndez Pozo is the epitome of Spain’s other reality, a world in which business empires are built through the most dubious of means — in the early 90s Méndez was imprisoned on charges of bribery — and where multi-million euro public contracts are won or lost on the basis of the depth of your pockets and the strength of your connections with local and national officialdom.

Two Worlds Collide

In Gamonal the hard-fought protests have succeeded in forestalling the city’s development project — at least for now. Pressure is being applied from opposition parties within the council to have it scrapped indefinitely — something the PP-controlled administration seems dead set against.

But public protests spreading like wildfire across the country, and the costs of such obstinacy are mounting fast.

On Friday night demonstrations in support of the Gamonal protesters were staged in more than forty Spanish cities, some of which turned pretty ugly. Violent clashes erupted between riot police and protestors in the country’s two largest cities, Madrid and Barcelona. As is becoming increasingly common, bank branches are bearing the brunt of the vandalism. In Barcelona a hard-core of protestors even briefly laid siege to a police station on the Ramblas— the beating heart of the city’s tourist district — using restaurant tables and chairs as weapons and barricades. In Madrid, firemen clashed with riot police.

In a perfect echo of recent French and English riots, any attempt to link the violence in Spain with deteriorating social and economic conditions is nipped in the bud by the government and media — in particular the all-but-official government mouthpiece, Televisión Española, which seems more interested in trying to divine how many eggs have been thrown at the windows of Burgos’ City Hall than trying to explore the actual causes of public anger.

The result is that the mere concept of cause and effect in the current social upheaval is consigned to the fringes of debate. Just as David Cameron spoke unchallenged of “feral youths” and “mindless criminals”, Mariano Rajoy’s government has insinuated that much of the violence in Gamonal was perpetrated by professional protestors who travel the land in search of a ruckus with men in helmets and padded uniform — a claim that is not only patently absurd but is directly contradicted by the police’s own arrest reports, which show that almost all of the people detained in last week’s riots live locally.

In the wake of the London riots, the British government and opposition parties came together to express their faux shock and outrage at the actions of the looters. However, as the Daily Telegraph‘s chief political commentator Peter Oborne wrote at the time (in what I believe is one of the best mainstream media articles written about the post-crisis reality), “the moral decay of our society is as bad at the top as it is at the bottom”:

I believe that the criminality in our streets cannot be dissociated from the moral disintegration in the highest ranks of modern British society. The last two decades have seen a terrifying decline in standards among the British governing elite. It has become acceptable for our politicians to lie and to cheat. An almost universal culture of selfishness and greed has grown up.

While Oborne wrote of the hubris of London’s business elite and the petty greed and hypocrisy of politicians implicated in the 2009 MPs expenses scandal, the Rajoy administration and his party, the Partido Popular, have taken corruption to a whole new heretofore unimagined level. And whereas a small number of British MPs have had to resign and even go to prison for their crimes, Spain’s senior bankers, ministers and deputies routinely scoff at the mere thought of justice prevailing.

As Elpidio José Silva, the judge who faces potential expulsion from the bench for daring to prosecute a senior banker, told the Spanish online daily Publico, “The news in Spain is not that there’s corruption at the top, it’s that there’s outright impunity.”

And it’s this culture of impunity, entitlement, hubris and wretched excess that has taken grip among Spain’s business and political elite that ultimately threatens the long-term viability of Spain’s fragile (some might say, phantom) recovery. More worrisome still, as the world of this elite repeatedly collides with that of the growing ranks of the abandoned, disenfranchised, desperate and resentful masses, the tenuously woven fabric of Spain’s post-Franco civil society continues to unravel at a disquieting pace. By Don Quijones Raging Bull-Shit

Jealousy is an emotion, and the word typically refers to the negative thoughts and feelings of insecurity, fear, and anxiety over an anticipated loss of something of great personal value, particularly in reference to a human connection. Jealousy often consists of a combination of emotions such as anger, resentment, inadequacy, helplessness and disgust.